A Gentleman's Commonplace

AA does travel

Well, we knew that. The Automobile Association, I mean. But AA Gill? Habitual Sunday Times readers will be tutting knowingly. So be it. But as someone who tends to read another paper (though the difference between any of them is vanishing) I've never read anything other than the pleasurably caustic reviews of the restaurant world he's been producing for seemingly ages. That he has won awards for his travel writing makes me all the more ashamed, particularly as Ben Hammersley links today to a piece he penned in 1999 on the Sudanese famine: The Hunger Gap

If you haven't the time to read the whole piece (and I strongly recommend that you place it in your favourites for later, if so), here are just a few choice snippets:

Six hours from Nairobi, it is like flying to Washington in a Morris Minor without a toilet.

Ajiep is where the buck finally stops. Having been passed from hand to mouth around the world it comes to rest in the shade of a thorn tree in this dry, hot earth. Here, finally, is that mythological, nursery tea-time place: “Remember all the starving people in Africa.” This is what we left on the side of our plates. Here is the end of the longest queue in the world. “The people less fortunate than yourself.”

I was dreading dinner: how do you eat in a promise of famine? Actually, it is not too difficult; not to eat would be a silly act of self-mortification. And we are hungry.

And finally,

When I got home, I tried to explain to my young daughter where I had been and what I had seen. “Are they dying?” she asked. Yes. “Where do they bury them?” Where do they bury them? In Monday’s rubbish, in the commercial break, in the turned page and the changed subject in Sunday lunch and under the prune stones on the side of your plate.

Food for thought

Steve Bowbrick recommends the Foodster blog but makes a very perceptive suggestion:

a lovely idea but shouldn't it be a Wiki?

Absolutely. I've found the Raw Food Wiki but nothing generally about food. It is begging to be done. Now though I am a foodie I am not your hardcore hacker, so is anyone else up for trying to get a Food Wiki up and running? (Or know of any others I couldn't find in my brief Googling?)

One for me, I think

One particularly useful aspect of a blog is as the aide memoire, particularly when you are as scatty and easily distracted as I. If the following recipe sits uneasily with a dead tortoise and Jerry Garcia, please accept my profound apologies and move on:

From an illuminating article in today's Guardian on that fine beverage, Marsala:

'I used it to make the most delicious pasta sauce. Here's how: fry chopped shallots with garlic until golden, throw in a few chunks of chicken liver and, when these are nicely brown on the outside but still pink in the middle, add a good wallop of marsala. Once a little of the alcohol has bubbled off, throw in lots of chopped parsley and serve over linguine.

Victoria Moore